Families’ Voices

Family Rights Group is committed to ensuring families’ voices are heard by the media, politicians and practitioners and they directly shape our child welfare system.

The 2018 report, commissioned by Family Rights Group, ‘Stepping Up, Stepping Down’, concluded that families had a significant – untapped – knowledge about policy and practice that had the potential to beneficially reform services from the ‘bottom up’.

However, we know from the many thousands of families contacting Family Rights Group’s advice service that many feel ‘judged’, ‘isolated and targeted’. Some feel overwhelmed by a cycle of multiple, chronic problems, yet their requests for help early on are often rejected due to their difficulties not being bad enough to meet ever narrowing service threshold criteria.

Family Rights Group works to counter the stigma, negative presumptions and judgemental approaches to families whose children are subject to, or at risk of, state intervention. We want to ensure that children and their families are key partners – working with practitioners, academics and politicians – in promoting reforms to law, policy, practice, and service design and delivery – to create a socially just, humane child welfare system.